Pittsburgh Business Journal: Pirates' TV Viewership Dips 15%

by Charlie on Oct 15, 2008 5:01 PM EDT Comment 13 comments

According to industry data, the Pirates saw their average number of viewers dip about 15 percent in 2008, compared with the previous year. The Pirates averaged about 32,000 households watching each game, according to research compiled by the Sports Business Journal...

The Washington Nationals continued their four-season streak as the least-watched team in Major League Baseball Their viewership was down about 50 percent, the Sports Business Journal found...

During the regular baseball season, both national and most regional sports networks reported viewer declines.

That 15% figure sounds alarming, but FOX Sports had a 12.5% drop in its overall game viewership, so the Pirates were only a bit worse than all the other teams FSN covers. Still, the Pirates only beat three teams in average viewership: the Nationals and Orioles (who are both broadcast on the same flailing network) and Royals. Neither article linked here states reasons for the overall decline of viewership, but I wonder how much of it has to do with MLB.tv, which is generally what I watch. If I couldn't, I'd probably go to bars with satellite TV every so often, and I'd watch more Padres games on local broadcast.

In any case, it'd be interesting to see a month-by-month breakdown of the Pirates' viewership. The team didn't play that badly in the first half, and the attendance really seemed to be awful in the second half (although the official figures don't suggest there was much of a change).

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I wonder if it’s long-term fans tuning out, or older fans dying off and not being replaced by young ones.

by Arnold Rothstein on Oct 15, 2008 8:51 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Fans at games

I don’t live in Pittsburgh anymore so I don’t go to very many games. But at most of the games I went to this season, the majority of the crowd (60%) seemed to be under the age of 30.

I made most of my life decisions at a Foghat concert... I stand by them.

by Chester J Lampwick on Oct 15, 2008 9:05 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

The common denominator is almost no one watches terrible baseball.

by scoreboard on Oct 15, 2008 11:01 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

The older I get

the less I want to spend 3 1/2 hours of what’s left of my life sitting still, watching anything on TV. Even a game I’m interested in I can’t watch from start to finish, and still I’m usually doing something else while it’s on. Tonight I turned on the Phillies-Dodgers in around the fifth inning and worked a jigsaw puzzle until the bottom of the ninth (yeah, I was sitting still but I was exercising my brain too).

We have a whole lot more people my age and older than we used to. If they do the same thing, this is what you get.

by bucdaddy on Oct 15, 2008 11:59 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

I don’t know if that’s something that’s unique to people your age; I think that’s just something in the air. More and more multitasking is required for our jobs, more and more stuff around us competes for our attention (cell phones, internet, ubiquitous ads). I don’t know the data offhand, but I’m sure we work longer hours, on average, than we did twenty years ago. I almost never watch a game from start to finish, uninterrupted, unless I’m hanging out with friends (who are their own kind of interruption). I watched most of the Pirates’ games this year, but I was almost always doing a couple different things, sometimes only during commercial breaks but sometimes during the games too. Personally, I have a lot of life left, but sitting still for three hours and watching just feels like a weird indulgence most of the time.

by Charlie on Oct 16, 2008 12:20 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Good points

My attention span now is about one good movie, maybe two hours tops. If I’m watching anything on TV longer than that, it’s like I can feel my brain atrophy.

by bucdaddy on Oct 16, 2008 9:49 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Stephen King ...

…was reading a book between pitches at yesterday’s Red Sox-Rays game.

Baseball is the thinking man’s game and very few people who attend games really understand the intricacies and nuances of baseball.

Still you can accomplish a lot of things while watching a game, whether at the ballpark or on TV.

Try doing any of those things at any other major sporting event (football, basketball or even hockey).

by thegunner on Oct 16, 2008 12:30 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

They say that a football game has around 43 minutes

of actual playing time in a game timed at 60 minutes. The NFL games are just as long as a MLB game, with just as much breaks between action. Football has a lot of idle time between plays, commercials, end of quarters and halves and I find myself filling the void on the computer, reading or working a crossword. Basketball and ice hockey demand more attention than baseball and football.

by ElliottBayBucco on Oct 16, 2008 7:33 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

It's not even close

to 43 minutes of action. Figure about five seconds per play against maybe 35-40 seconds to unpile, huddle up, come to the line, signals and hike. I’d guess there’s 10 minutes of action or less in a football game, spread out over 3 1/2 hours. Who was it who wrote that football incorporates two of the worst aspects of modern life: violence and committee meetings.

by bucdaddy on Oct 17, 2008 12:25 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Football is way more of a thinking man's game than baseball

Since at least half, and sometimes all 22 players on the field are moving at the same time, replays are also much more valuable in seeing the whole play and understanding why something happened. Sometimes it’s not complicated, but often it’s spectacularly informative. I’m waiting for when they let me watch a game from any angle I want like the options in Nascar.com.

by azibuck on Oct 17, 2008 12:58 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Pirate attendance

They can’t blame some of that lousy second half attendance on weather,either,can they?

by rissaldar on Oct 16, 2008 9:53 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Personally, I used to love to listen on the radio.

You can maintain some involvement in the game while still getting something else done.

Too bad about the switch from KDKA. I refuse to listen to 104.7, so it’s TV or nothing for me these days.

by Vlad on Oct 16, 2008 10:59 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Hmm...yeah.

I usually watch Pirates games on MLB Extra Innings on DirecTV, usually taking which ever feed is in HD. If both are in HD, i watch the FSN Pittsburgh feed. Yeah, can’t blame the bad TV viewership on weather, rissaldar….

by IAPiratesFan on Oct 16, 2008 8:45 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs